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Aug 30

Animation Assault (Horror Sundays)

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Horror Sundays continues with Best of Druid Underground Film Festival Animation Showcase
International animated shorts culled from the screening archives of the Druid Underground Film Festival. The VERY BEST of over A DECADE of rowdy, subversive programming screened on tour across the USA and compiled here for the first time ever!

Bruce Bickford’s CAS’L (2015)
Shot over a 20 year span, CAS’L is Bruce Bickford’s first all-claymation short feature. Bickford talks about his bizarre, technical, horrifying stream-of-consciousness film in the following description: “Mercenaries and other obnoxious brutes are trying to muscle in on the CAS’L’ area. They’re looking for trouble and find it. Stray energies in the area morph them into grotesque bulbous heads. The conquistadors and barbarians of the castle are smoking the wrong brand of cigarettes that cause them to commit random violence, even against each other. Some little people and fairy folk defeat many of them.”

DJ Drew Redmond and his guest of the week will be spinning wild ass bizarro rock 45s before and after the screenings!

NEXT WEEK: the final week of Druid Underground’s film residency! 

Aug 30

WTF NYC (Horror Sundays)

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From 1968 to 2015, two weirdo horror films created and set in New York…. Toast our city’s infinite variety and wild spirit following Bushwig festival of drag. Films provided by Horror Boobs and Something Weird Video. Presented by Druid Underground Film Festival for the Horror Sundays series.

The Toxic Retards (2015)
Carl J Sukenick has been making horror movies in his NYC apartment for the last 30 years. As a filmmaker he uses the medium of horror as a means of therapy to navigate his mental illness. The Toxic Retards is the penultimate example of every idiosyncratic technique Sukenick has developed in his career. Groundbreaking, spellbinding and horrifying.

Confessions of a Psycho Cat (1968)
A wealthy, psychotic seductress invites three notorious tough-as-nails men (including actual boxing legend Jake La Motta) to her swanky trophy room saying she’ll give them each $100,000 “if you can stay alive in Manhattan for 24 hours!” Thus begins an epically sleazy play on The Most Dangerous Game. A true NYC horror oddity and the wildest murder scene ever shot in the middle of Central Park.

DJ Drew Redmond and his guest of the week will be spinning wild ass bizarro rock 45s before and after the screenings!

Aug 30

NOT READY! with M. Beharie

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Knockdown Center kicks off a month-long series of DJ nights in the Ready Room bar! We’re not ready for summer to end! Come get down with a killer line-up of acts every night in our bar!

Aug 29

Motorcycle Mayhem Double Feature (Horror Sundays)

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with Druid Underground Film Festival Horror Sundays series:

Undertaker and His Pals (1966)
A macabre story of two motorcycle-riding, knife-wielding, shiv-shaving, eye-gouging, arm-twisting, chain-lashing, scalpel-flashing, acid-throwing, gun-shooting, bone-breaking, pathological nuts and their pal the undertaker.

Road of Death (1973)
Sleazy swingers, marauding motorheads, and so many continuity errors that to make a drinking game out of it would mean an almost certain death. This shot-in-Florida biker revenge epic starring Thora Birch’s porn star parents is “so cheap and sleazy and amazingly godawful that it’s a sick delight from beginning to end” – Luther Heggs, SWV

All films provided by Something Weird Video

Aug 29

Poetry on Art: Brooklyn Book Festival Bookend Event

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Join us for a conversation on the intersection of poetry and visual art and a reading with contributors Ken Chen and Elaine Equi. Hosted by Paolo Javier and Fred Sasaki.

Ken Chen is the Executive Director of The Asian American Writers’ Workshop and the 2009 recipient of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award for his poetry collection Juvenilia. A founding contributor to Arts & Letters Daily, he is one of the founders of CultureStrike, a national organization seeking to bring artists into the migrant justice movement.

Elaine Equi is the author of many collections of poetry including, Voice-Over, which won the San Francisco State Poetry Award; Ripple Effect: New & Selected Poems, which was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Award and on the short list for The Griffin Poetry Prize; Click and Clone; and most recently, Sentences and Rain. Widely published and anthologized, her work has appeared in The Nation, Brooklyn Rail, Poetry, The New Yorker, and several editions of The Best American Poetry. She teaches at New York University and in the MFA program at The New School.

ABOUT THE HOSTS:
Paolo Javier is the author of four full-length collections of poetry, including Court of the Dragon (2015), which Publisher’s Weekly calls “a linguistic time machine.” A featured artist in MoMA PS1’s 2015 Greater NY Show, he has received grants from the Queens Council on the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts, and completed residencies at the Millay Colony, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and the ACA Galleries. His recent collaboration with Listening Center (David Mason) appears as a limited edition book/cassette, Ur’lyeh/Aklopolis, published by Texte und Töne in fall of 2016.

Fred Sasaki is the art director for Poetry and gallery curator for Poetry Foundation. He is also a host of Homeroom’s School Night lecture series.

ABOUT THE CO-PRESENTERS:
For over a century, Poetry has been famous for discovering the poets and poems we now remember. And now, the voices to be discovered in Poetry are more diverse then ever—voices that speak to our own time, our own moment.
Founded in October 2000, the Brooklyn Rail is an independent forum for arts, culture and politics throughout New York City and beyond. Printed ten times annually, and featuring criticism of visual art, music, dance, film, theater and literature, as well as original fiction, poetry and political commentary, the Rail is distributed free of charge both in print and online.IN THE GALLERY:
Knockdown Center presents Cold Open Verse featuring Constance DeJong, Sophia Le Fraga, and Ian Hatcher.

Blonde Art Books has teamed up with Poet Transmit to present a book preview reel and live studio featuring theatrical trailers for publications, self-produced commercials, and live broadcast performance relating to the concept of the book and an expanded notion of transmission and poetry.

At 3:30pm, join curators Victoria Keddie and Cat Tyc for a guided tour of the exhibit.

8141
This is an official 2016 Brooklyn Book Festival event.
Aug 25

2MF with Eric Ramos Guerrero

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Knockdown Center hosts 2MF’s September 2016 meeting:

“I’ve fallen in love for the last time/You’ve got to know you a chicken”
My intimate relationship with with post-industrial bohemia

How did I end up here? Was this a mistake?

New York is a hard place for an artist. Many of us could live elsewhere and afford larger work studios, larger homes, better food and weather. The internet allows us to collaborate through the internet. We can share ideas, images and sound in mere moments. Why do we stay in a city that clearly goes out of its way to make things difficult?

Eric Ramos Guerrero discusses coping and navigating the trappings of freedom, examining how 19th and 20th century bohemia informs how we see ourselves in the studio. Questions about how one should navigate New York’s bohemian art world that are unanswerable by those in attendance will be directed to a spirit that we will communicate through a glass and lettered board.

Is it all worth it?

Pre-meeting listening and viewing:

Music playlist via YouTube
1. The Boho Dance Joni Mitchell
2. The India Song Big Star
3. I Want to Break Free Queen
4. Walk on the Wildside Lou Reed
5. Samson and Delilah (aria) Mon coeur s’ouvre a ta voix Klaus Nomi
6. Caravan Van Morrison 14. Know Your Chicken Cibo Motto
7. Frankly, Mr. Shankly The Smiths 15. Downtown The b-52’s
8. All the Young Dudes David Bowie 16. Wasn’t Born to Follow The Byrds
9. Don’t Kiss Me Goodbye Ultra Orange & Emmanuelle
10. Into My Own Thing Sly & the Family Stone
11. The Way We Get By Spoon
12. Tu Davilla 666
13. Fame and Fortune Graham Coxon
14. Know Your Chicken Cibo Motto
15. Downtown The b-52’s
16. Wasn’t Born to Follow The Byrds

Divination playlist via You Tube
1. Fortune Teller The Hollies
2. Troubles of My Own Fats Domino
3. Deja Vu Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
4. Ouija Board Morrissey
5. Crystal Ball Styx
6. Close Encounters Bats for Lashes
7. Cool Song No.2 mgmt
8. Magic Olivia Newton John
9. Blue Eyed Here Pixies

Spirit of the glass. so scary don’t do it. (Via You Tube)

About the Artist:
Eric Ramos Guerrero is a multidisciplinary artist based in New York City. He was born in the Philippines and moved to California where he received a BA from San Diego State University. He then attend The School of The Art Institute of Chicago where he received his BFA in 2006. The following year he moved to New York where Ramos Guerrero completed his MFA from Columbia University in 2009. Ramos Guerrero has shown his work in New York at The Drawing Center, El Museo Del Barrio, White Box, The Ise Cultural Foundation, The Fisher Landau Center for Art, The Knockdown Center and internationally at the Inside-Out Museum, Beijing, China, Pongnoi Art Space, Chiang Mai, Thailand, The Centro Cultural De La Raza in Mexico and Chelsea College in London.

About 2MF:
2MF, co-run by artists Sonya Derman and Maria Stabio, is a practice that encourages pro-emotive and ante-academic conversation among artists in New York City. Collaborating each month with selected facilitating thinkers, 2MF organizes monthly community meetings – open and participatory experiences – alongside post-meeting discussion aired and archived at Clocktower Radio. More information is available at 2manyfeelings.com.

Aug 24

Caesar Caesar X NADA present Sasha Go Hard & more

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Chicago drill rapper Sasha Go Hard, with NYC’s own Salomon Faye, Psychoegyptian (Mykki Blanco’s Dogfood Music Group), HAK (formerly of Ratking) plus DJ AHARAW (Doom Dab), Joey Desktop, and Gregory Free, with extra live performance guests!! Presented by Caesar Caeser Records and NADA (New Art Dealers Alliance).

 

Aug 23

Aya Rodriguez-Izumi: Offering

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“Offering” is the latest one-on-one interactive piece created by Aya Rodriguez-Izumi. In it, the participant is lead through a ritual with the artist where a story from their personal history is transformed into an offering within the performance. It deals with the idea of sacrifice and the concept of being initiated into a created community whether it be a religious group, a counter culture revolution or a secret society. By giving a personal tale from the participant’s life, they are taken on a journey that explores the experience of loss.

Please join us for the second iteration of this performance. RSVP to dnahere@gmail.com. Please arrive at Knockdown Center at 6:30pm to be assigned a time slot. The first 25 RSVP’s will get guaranteed entrance to the performance so sign up early!

Presented as part of the exhibition MAMI, curated by Ali Rosa-Salas and Dyani Douze

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